CHIBOK GIRLS: TWO YEARS LATER

What moral right do we have to tell our children
to go to school when we can’t protect them there? Yusuf Abubakar (Coordinator
of the sit-out group Bring Back Our Girls)

Precisely, two years ago, on Monday, the 14th of April 2014,
276 girls were abducted from the Government Girls' Secondary School Chibok dormitories. 57 girls escaped while 219 girls are still missing. From
April 14, 2014 to April 14, 2016; 18 parents of the Chibok Girls have died. The
aforementioned figures are a snapshot of the Chibok Girls story.

Most Nigerians might recollect the time/period when the Chibok Girls
story began to drum into our recollective skulls. For me, I began to take
notice, some days later, when an On-Air-Personality Sope Martins was speechless
on her morning show with her colleague Mazino of Smooth FM in Lagos. Some weeks
later, on the 30th of April 2014, I was somewhere in Kigali, the
capital of Rwanda, unpacking my luggage and I noticed on BBC World that #BringBackOurGirls had become global and
Mrs Oby Ezekwesili was to appear on a BBC programme. Who would believe that an
incident in Chibok Town in Borno State would galvanise global momentum? Global
momentum, which many believed would have resulted in action in rescuing the
Chibok Girls.

I sidestepped writing about the Chibok Girls (because everyone was
writing about it then and I decided to keep my thoughts to myself after discovering
and observing other cultures’ high regard for the women folk). But my perspective
changed when I met a top Nigerian-American official at Pfizer USA, who told me
that writers did not have the obligation
to keep mute. He also described the nonchalant attitude of government
officials he had met in Abuja, who did not care about what the plight of the
Chibok Girls might be. This I wrote about in my piece
for the 100th day of their abduction which was on the 23rd
of July 2014. Not forgetting the fiasco
that transpired on Monday the 21st of July 2014, at the Nnamdi
Azikiwe Airport in Abuja while Dr
Obiageli Ezekwesiliwas about to
board a British Airways flight to London to be on BBC HardTalk’s 100 days of
the Chibok Abduction (watch the video).

Two years after the abduction of the Chibok Girls, stories of various
dimensions have been coming to the fore. From how the military soldiers guarding
that school were reduced, how they were recalled hours before the abduction,
the tales of a long convoy of trucks to the school. The inability of the
military to rescue the girls. How some of the girls had managed to pull
themselves out of the trucks when they got to the forest by grabbing onto
branches and hanging in there, according to Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times.
Also, stories bordering on how girls
and women who have escaped Boko Haram’s captivity and who are in Internally
Displaced Persons’ camps (IDPs) are being marginalised and segregated and being
seen as outcasts by other IDP inhabitants. And stories by Dr Stephen Davis, an
Australian clergyman who had almost
negotiated the release of some of the Chibok Girls but final talks broke down.
The clergy man is adamant that the location of some of the Chibok Girls is not
difficult to find for him, even on Google Maps.

A cornucopia of issues ranging from psychological problems, post
traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs), teenage pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies,
divided homes, missing parents, missing family members, missing children are
issues springing up. And even sexual abuses in the IDP Camps as reported by Christina
Lamb in her articlein the UK’s Sunday Times of March 20,
2016.

Two years after the Chibok Girls abduction and after several assurances
by President Muhammadu Buhari, his administration might be working to track
down the exact location of the Chibok Girls (who reports have it that they might have been divided into groups)
or what has become of them. But the truth of the matter is that information
management with regards the Chibok Girls is not satisfactory. Like someone
queried; who is the contact person in the
Buhari Administration with regards the Chibok Girls? Isnt the government
seeking assistance in terms of intelligence from nations willing to help?

The Buhari Administration can not be said to have succeeded come 2019,
if the Buhari-led administration cannot give the Chibok parents, Nigerians,
Africans and the world, a holistic report of what has happened to the 219 still
missing girls from Chibok town. For the doubting Thomases, who still question
the veracity of the Chibok Girls’ abduction; the Goodluck Jonathan
administration set up a committee to look into the case, and it was reported
the girls were abducted. But the findings of the committee have not been made
public. Baffling.

This should not be baffling, when you remember that it had to
take a trip by the
Pakistani Girl rights activist Malala Yousafza, to Nigeria on the 90th
day of the Chibok Girls abduction
and soliciting a promise by President Goodluck Jonathan to meet with the Chibok
Girls’ parents. Also
baffling is the story that since the abduction, the governor of Borno state,
Governor Kashim Shetima (in which Chibok lies) has not visited the parents.
Instead, he sent the district chairman a bag of rice, 30,000 naira and some
fabric, which he said was a gift from the president.

Also baffling is the picture and PR ops, former Finance
Minister Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweal had with some of the parents of the Chibok
Girls, when she laid the foundation of a new building for the Government Girls
College Chibok in May 2015. Pictures of the
laying of foundation and with the parents
were taken. But till date, the building has not been completed.

On the issue
of amnesty cum de-radicalisation programmes for “repentant” Boko Haram
insurgents, how can we as a nation via our government even contemplate
pardoning members and fighters of Boko Haram-the world’s deadliest extremist group?
A group that has used at least 105 women and girls in suicide attacks since
June 2014? Heinous crimes against humanity were committed.

According to
a global online publication, the
Global Terrorism Index ranks Boko Haram as the world’s deadliest terrorist
group. In its ever more violent quest to create an Islamic caliphate in
northern Nigeria, the group has killed more than 15,000 people, razed villages
and forced more than 2m people to flee their homes over the past seven years.
Living up to its name, which translates as “western education is forbidden”, it
has also forced more than 1m children from school, according to UNICEF, burning
their buildings and abducting thousands to work as cooks, lookouts and sex
slaves.

Dr Ferdinand Ikwang, who runs a deradicalisation programme
for former Boko Haram members and captives, told a reporter about a group of women
and girls released in 2015. Amongst this group was a five-year-old who had been
raped so many times that her pelvis had shattered and she “walks like a dog”.

No sane society (except the one where abnormality is the norm) would such happen and
punitive measures would not be implemented. The "Operation Safe Corridor", a
programme launched by the Nigerian Military headquarters to rehabilitate
repentant Boko Haram fighters through camps where they will be offered jobs and
training in return for undergoing biometric profiling. Around 800 fighters had
already signed up, and that camps would open all over north-east Nigeria in
coming months.

But where would they get jobs from? In
the same areas they ransacked, burnt homes, raped people, killed people? Let us call a spade a
spade. Boko Haram committed acts of rape, which is a weapon of war and probably
committed genocide.

But reading the last 3 paragraphs of New York Times’ West Africa Bureau
Chief, Dionne
Searcey’s pieceon Boko
Haram, published on Thursday, April 7, 2016. Gives one a glimmer of hope about
the Chibok Girls. According to Dionne Searcey; Boko Haram incorporated the lack of food into their training, Ms. Amos
said. Several months ago, she said, fighters rounded up the women and took them
to an old factory to view a set of plump, well-fed girls who had plenty of food
and water. Follow our ways, the fighters said, and you can have enough to eat,
like these girls. The girls, some crying, told Ms. Amos they were from Chibok,
the Nigerian village where Boko Haram had captured the schoolgirls. American
State Department and military officials said they would investigate the
statements from Ms. Amos about the girls.“They were very
fat,” Ms. Amos said, compared with herself and the other women who were being
held, “and they had lots of water.”

On the 600th day of the Chibok Girls abduction
on the 5th of December 2015, I wrote a piece
published in The Guardian Newspaper; in which I wrote that “several months ago,
I was discussing with a Rwandan diplomat stationed in the West and the diplomat
went thus; Can a country give up on her girls? In Rwanda, children are a
”pearl”, when you lose it you search for it until you find even if it is under
your dead body. A girl is the “future of humanity.” This statement left me
thinking and wondering where Nigeria and Nigerians have gotten it wrong.”

In this writer’s moments of ruminating and soliloquising about the
Chibok Girls, this question has reared its head on a couple of occasions; have
we as humanity, disappointed the Chibok Girls. Yes we have. And the quote below
amplifies this

“Every time a world leader gets up and
says girls should go to school, they lack moral credibility when 219 brave
girls went to school in a place called Chibok and never came back.” –Mrs Oby
Ezekwesili.